Thursday, May 31, 2007

Gracie is the most recent cat addition to the family. I originally named her Panda Puss, but that didn’t really fit. So she became Gracie. She is a great cat, even though she is still somewhat emotionally scarred from the hard times she experienced before she joined us…

Here is a photo of her the day she arrived:

You can see she does not look well. Her fur is unhealthy looking, she is thin, and her eyes have a haunted look to them. I think she was really still in shock at that point.

And what you can’t see in that top photo is that the tip of her tail has been broken off. Yes, something had happened to her that cost her the end of her tail. Was it caught In a door? Did a dog bite it off? I’ll never know. But when I first took her in it still had some dead material attached and the stump was still very painful to her. She didn’t even want me looking at it.

I first met Gracie one night around midnight as I was on my way to work. I was driving down my own street, about 4 houses down the road from where I live, when I saw her eyes reflecting in my car’s headlights. I stopped and called out to her and she came over to me and let me pick her up. She was thin and waif like… a slight wisp of a kitty, mostly fur. As I was talking to her, holding her and trying to decide if she was lost and if I should take her home and give her a meal and a safe place to stay, she suddenly HISSSSED at something behind me! I turned around, and there was the large Siamese cat I call Winston Churchill (I’ve no idea what his actual name is). I’d only seen him once before, but I knew he lived in the little condo complex I was standing in front of. I thought that the thin kitty knew Winston, And so I put her down and went on to work.

The next morning, I went grocery shopping and then headed home again. As I drove down my street I saw some of the neighborhood children were out, and that the little black & white cat from the night before was there with them! I pulled over and Asked the kids if they knew the cat. They Said she had been hanging around for a few days, but that they had never seen her before then, and that she did not seem to have a home. I took out some cooked chicken I’d bought at the grocery store, and tore off some little pieces and offered them to the cat. She gobbled it all up with great glee. Seeing how hungry she was, I decided to go ahead and bring her home with me. I told the kids that if anyone asked about her to send them down to my house. And that is how Gracie first arrived at my house and joined the family as cat number nine.

In a photo taken a month or so after she arrived, you can see Gracie is looking both healthier and more relaxed:

And, in her most recent photo, you can see how she has filled out and fluffed out, and really begun to show her full beauty. She weighs at least twice as much as when she first arrived! And her tail, though obviously shorter than normal, is all healed up now. She likes to lie on top of me when I'm sleeping.

Well, thanks Shanti, Janina, and Ariel, for your sweet comments, from both me AND Gracie! These cats who come to us as strays have this aura of mystery to them... not knowing where they came from, or how they wound up as strays. I know Gracie had been traumatized, injured and starved while she was on her own, but it was obvious she was also used to getting love from some human earlier in her life. Who was that, and how did they come to be parted? All a mystery...

We have a cat almost identical to this who turned up around Christmastime. He also had been through difficult times, was thin, starving, matted fur and very nervous and shy. Over time we befriended him and began to feed him and then set about trying to find his owner. After about 3 months we found out his owner had died and he'd been fending for himself for almost 12 months. He's now been desexed, wormed, washed, well fed, and registered. He still won't stay in overnight and is anxious to get outside, but is more than happy to stay inside all day when there's movement around the house. We've named him Toki and the vet says he's about 3 years old.

I posted signs around theneighborhood when I firsttook in Gracie. One neighborcalled and said Gracie had been around as a stray fora couple of weeks. She saidshe had been giving her somephone and also trying to findsomeone to adopt her. She couldnot take Gracie herself becauseher single cat did not approveof her giving attention to anyother cats.

My vet said Gracie was around2 or 3 years old when I tookher in for the first time.